


Fate Up Against Your Will

by SekritOMG



Category: South Park
Genre: Contemporary Art, M/M, Pittsburgh, Semi-Public Sex, Urination, salami misuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 11:12:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6982141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SekritOMG/pseuds/SekritOMG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>February 14, 2016 // December 24-5, 2015</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fate Up Against Your Will

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nhaingen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nhaingen/gifts), [julads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/julads/gifts).



> Thanks especially to Negs for hostessing and to Julads for the impeccable beta, local insight, and everything else.

I.

Kyle is breathing hard while he waits for his latte, his cheeks flushed and his lips fat and red—from quick, vicious kissing in the mirror room and from the bracing wind that’s whipping down the empty streets of Pittsburgh. It’s sunny, and it’s still snowing, and Kyle sits with his back to the big storefront window of this coffee shop. For once this trip his phone is nowhere in sight. He pushes his coat off, looking around. “No one in here saw, did they,” he asks, forgetting to inflect it like a question.

“I really don’t think so,” says Stan, “though I’m also not sure what would happen if someone did.”

“I hope not,” Kyle breathes. “I hope not, I would have to curl up and die of embarrassment.”

“It’s not a big deal.” Stan has one ear cocked for the barista so they don’t miss him calling out their drinks.

“Jesus, it is a big deal.” Rubbing his eyes, Kyle groans. “This trip is an utter disaster.”

“It’s fine,” Stan says. He tries to be cheery: “I had fun, um, just now.”

Kyle snaps, “No you didn’t!” and he begins to looks around again. “Jesus, don’t talk about it, don’t even talk about it. I’m going to get a UTI, holy shit.”

“You’re not going to get a UTI. We went over this, calm down.”

“Stan, shut up!”

The barista’s standing there with a low, wide mug without a handle and a pedestal foot. “I have a latte?”

“That’s mine!” Kyle reaches out to grab it and thinks better of it, pulling back. “You can—sorry. That’s mine. Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Sugar’s over there…” He points toward the corner, where there’s a bar cart with the usual.

“Do you have Splenda?” Stan asks, so Kyle doesn’t have to.

“We have, um, Truvia. It’s like stevia.” It’s said with a hint of defiance. “It’s natural.”

“I know what it is,” Kyle snaps. He shakes his head. “Thanks, sorry.”

“Your tea’ll be up soon,” the barista tells Stan, and he walks away.

Out of his pocket Kyle pulls a little supermarket dispenser of Splenda tablets, which he shakes into his latte while looking around suspiciously: three, four, five. He waits for them to dissolve.

“I hate that we came here,” Kyle says casually, leaning back against the window. It’s cold, and he’s shocked and jerks forward.

Stan’s grinning at him. “It was worth a try,” he says.

“Oh, everything’s worth a try,” Kyle scoffs.

“Admit it,” Stan says, “you had fun.”

“I don’t find being terrified fun.”

“It was hot.”

“I’ll wait to pass judgment on that until I find out if I’m gonna develop a UTI.”

“ _Please_.” It’s dismissive.

The spoon is plunked into the latte, and Kyle stirs it rhythmically along the perimeter.

“And one sencha,” says the barista, who sets the clear teapot in front of Stan. It comes with a clear glass, no handle, on a wooden tray.

“Thanks!” Stan lets it steep for a few minutes before he pours himself a serving, his palm locked in place on Kyle’s thigh.

They lock eyes as they clink glasses. “It was worth a try,” Stan repeats.

“You and your idioms. What if I tried not to do anything anymore, how about that?”

“We have to see places outside of Colorado _sometime_ ,” says Stan. “I mean, clearly, if we’re moving.”

“Well, who knows what’s going to happen.”

Silence falls over them as snow continues to fall outside.

Kyle struggles to sit still; he starts twitching, swirling his latte around without drinking it.

“You okay?”

“I just hope no one saw.”

“Kyle.” Stan puts down his teacup on its wooden board. He puts his hand back on Kyle’s thigh. “It’s going to be okay.”

“I’m sure, right.”

“It’s nice to spend Valentine’s Day doing something, you know—”

Kyle softens. “Well,” he says, “it’s better than a lap dance at Rawhides.”

“That place sucks, anyway.” Stan blows on his tea before sipping it. “Next year we’ll be somewhere else entirely.”

“Yeah,” Kyle agrees. “Yeah. I sure hope.”

* * *

II.

Kyle flees, and Stan flies after him, pounding down the staircase with his parka flapping open. It smacks against the mental railings and into the face of a little girl heading upstairs with her mother. Stan thinks to call out, “Sorry!” behind him, but he doesn’t—it would call attention to what’s happening, and what’s happening is that Kyle is putting distance between them and what happened back upstairs. No one saw them, that’s for sure. No one saw them, so why is Kyle running away?

He finally stops in the alleyway, icy underneath the romance of three fresh inches of white Valentine’s snow. “Fuck,” Kyle pants, and he bends over. He’s clutching his side. “I have a cramp,” he spits out. “Stan, help—”

“I’m here.” Stan grabs Kyle by the lapels of his jacket and stands him up straight. “It’s okay, dude, we’re fine. That was hot.”

“No it wasn’t,” Kyle spits out. “No it _was_ n’t, oh my _god_ , dude.”

“It was kind of hot,” Stan insists. “Incredibly so.”

“Something—what? Something can’t be kind of and incredibly hot. At once. Ah, fuck.”

“I loved it.” Stan leans into Kyle’s face, their breath hanging in the cold air.

Kyle pushes Stan away. “I need a bathroom,” he says.

“Let’s go back into the museum.”

“I can’t, people saw, people know—”

“Kyle, no, they don’t.”

“Shut up!” Kyle grabs his coat and rips it open. “Oh my god, Stan, for fuck’s sake. Do you think I could get a UTI?” His fingers are trembling as he fumbles for the fly of his jeans; there’s shock on his face when he sees it’s already (still) down.

“A what? Kyle, no. From docking?”

“Well, there’s like, probably you don’t do a very good job cleaning yourself or whatever, and my dumb transplant kidney isn’t so great—I don’t know, just, shield me, okay!” It’s an order, not a question.

“Okay,” Stan agrees. He stands with his parka open, staring as Kyle pulls out his spent dick. It’s still half-hard, slick with Stan’s pre-come, and Stan just wants to grab it again and go back to jerking it, or cover it in soft, wet kisses—the kind of stuff they did in college when Kyle was really into that kind of thing. The overstimulation stuff, mainly; Kyle’s still into having Stan’s mouth on his dick, just, not so much right after he comes anymore. Or, maybe sometimes. Special occasions. Didn’t they do that on Kyle’s last birthday? That was so long ago—

“Stop staring at my dick,” Kyle hisses. “It’s suspicious.”

“Right,” Stan agrees. “This is the part that’s suspicious.” He looks up at the brick wall behind Kyle’s head, tagged with what could be years of artsy nonsense. Stan respects graffiti as a real art form, though this stuff is cartoonish and eighties-looking and not, altogether, that great. But it’s best to look at the wall, because if he were to glance down, it would probably remind him of his backyard growing up in the dead of winter, the week after a sustained snowfall, when he’d just let Sparky go out there instead of taking him on real walks.

“One day,” says Stan, “we’re going to look back on this trip and kind of laugh about how insane it was, right?”

The stream of Kyle’s urine trickles to a halt. He’s breathing hard. He growls, “Shut up, Stan.”

* * *

III.

“Where are we even going?” Kyle stands in the street staring up at the building, which is tall and looks taller because the houses in Pittsburgh are low, and they’re in a narrow alley. Everything’s covered in snow, and Kyle’s jeans are wet up to mid-calf. His phone is clutched in his hands as he’s standing there slack-jawed, half-confused and half-annoyed, like he’s in the middle of a bad dream.

“It’s just an art museum.” Stan starts to head inside, and gets annoyed when Kyle doesn’t budge. “Come on.”

“But, like, I don’t know,” Kyle starts saying, and it pisses Stan off so much he goes inside and lines up at the ticket booth.

When Kyle finally joins Stan, he leans in and asks, “Why is there a line here?”

“People are waiting to get into the museum.” It’s an open space here on the ground floor, and they crowd into the little elevator with another couple who look like a pair of kids—girls in heavy winter coats, one whose red hair is caught in her scarf, wrapped partly around her neck. That must be uncomfortable, Stan thinks, it must be scratchy, is she wearing a high collar? He can’t see because of the scarf. Her hair is like copper, not auburn like Kyle’s; it’s greasy and straight-ish or at least it isn’t curly, and the elevator takes forever to get to the top floor as Stan muses on the color and the texture of Kyle’s hair. The girls get off at a floor of James Turrells, but Stan and Kyle continue on to see the installation by Greer Lankton.

“This is depressing,” Kyle says, peering into it. It’s the façade of a house built into this one big room in the factory; the inside has the palette and the lighting of a drug den. But it’s full of scary camp imagery, the detritus of gay life: off-kilter dolls, pill bottles, and crosses. There’s a pile of Raggedy Anns, or Raggedy Andies; Kyle really can’t tell, and he recoils from the artwork. “I hate this,” he says. “I honestly do.”

“I just find it really soothing.”

“How? How, Stan, is this soothing?”

“Just, the idea of creating such a powerful self-portrait before you die.” Stan shrugs. “That’s soothing to me.”

“Whatever. Take your time.” Kyle nearly leans against the wall and then thinks better of it; he draws his phone from his pocket and scowls.

“Ike hasn’t texted yet, has he?”

“Just, whatever, I’m over this,” Kyle says, but he checks his phone again. He sighs and puts it back into his pocket.

“You mean the art?” Stan nods toward the installation, hoping that’s not what Kyle means. “Or Ike?”

“The whole thing, fuck, why’d I bother coming to Pittsburgh?”

As Kyle stalks off Stan takes a few minutes to take in the Lankton. As a child Stan wasn’t especially fond of dolls, though he was coerced into dressing up like Raggedy Andy for Halloween one year. And lord knows he’s dealt with his own issues. He takes one last wistful drink of the nest of pill ~~s~~ bottles on the bed and goes to find Kyle.

It’s cold, this museum; it’s freezing. Stan wanders all the way up and around buzzing installations of rickety pseudoscience and haphazard structures; one’s like a wasp’s next built of garbage. The thought makes him shudder, and he wonders if Kyle hasn’t left. Their best museum-going is really done alone, Stan figures, but it’s taken him many years of dating Kyle to come to see this. When they studied abroad together, junior year of college, Stan spent the first half of their visit to the Branly quibbling over whether it made sense to visit the gift shop first. Of course it didn’t, but Kyle wanted to, and he stormed off and left Stan to actually look at the art. Despite this academic knowledge about his and Kyle’s tandem viewing habits, he feels like the Mattress Factory is less a museum and more an experience, and why wouldn’t Kyle just walk through it with him? Stan wanders past those girls from the elevator; one of them’s taken her coat off and she’s wearing a baggy sweater with a pattern so offensive Stan dodges their giggling and heads back downstairs. He wants to see what’s on the other floors.

He finds Kyle in stocking feet on a bench outside closed doors which lead to an installation. Kyle barely looks up from his phone. “There’s some women in there,” he says.

“We can wait,” Stan says. He glances at the threadbare socks on Kyle’s feet and flexes his fingers in the under-heated vacuum of the post-industrial wreck they’ve paid to freeze to death in. He sighs, puts covers on his boots, and rests his head against Kyle’s shoulder as they wait. Kyle puts a hand to Stan’s thigh, and for a moment Stan knows he could pass out just like this, his dick hardening halfway under the warmth of Kyle’s hand, heated from constantly pecking at his phone. But then the phone buzzes with a message, and Stan is taken out of the moment.

“Ike says he’s got a study group at 4,” says Kyle. “Such bullshit.”

“Maybe he does, dude. He’s in _college_.”

“I remember, thanks.”

Stan’s dick is no less tight when they’re finally allowed into the room. It’s actually a series of two: one black-lit, with multicolored dots and an eternity of miniscule lights hanging above them, and one with only red dots painted all around and up and down two bewigged mannequins.

It’s not exactly erotic, which is why Stan finds it odd when he’s pushed against the door to wedge it shut. No one else is getting in here now. “What’s this?” he asks.

“I saw you get hard when I touched you,” Kyle says. “Don’t pretend.”

Stan couldn’t possibly.

It’s not the first or most egregious sexual exploit to which Kyle has subjected Stan. In the heady days of their proto-romantic best friendship, back in the clutches of a harrowing four years at Park County High School, Kyle had once confessed to having fucked himself with a hard salami. At 17 this hadn’t struck Stan as something to get off to, per se, but he’d thought about it over and over again, quite fascinated, fixated on the idea, spending trips with his mother to the supermarket in the upscale deli section, trying to guess the product that was the lucky winner in Kyle’s consideration of which charcuterie, exactly, to ram into his own ass. Once they began dating, Kyle never mentioned it again, like he considered his butt too good to accommodate anything else now that it had the pleasure of knowing Stan’s dick. Stan had actually put the salami thing well out of mind until a few weeks ago, when Kyle slipped his spit-lubed middle and index fingers under Stan’s foreskin and drunkenly called it ‘natural casing’—now it is impossible for Stan to go into the lunch meat section of Whole Foods without getting a boner.

“Hey,” Stan breathes, his head slamming back against the mirrored wall. “Do you remember that salami thing? You never bring it up anymore?”

Kyle’s head jerks up and he huffs, “I was like 15,” like that covers it. Stan knows they’re not going to discuss it, though as Kyle fumbles with Stan’s zipper, Stan’s mind wanders toward thoughts of little Kyle begging his mother to buy a nice salami at the grocery store, and then stealing away with it, locking himself in his room. He has to shake it off; that has nothing to do with the mirrored room, and nothing to do with Pittsburgh.

The joy of sex with Kyle was how unbridled it could be, even as Kyle kept himself fairly self-contained. “You’re really hard,” he slurs in Stan’s ear, though surely they both know that Stan has been harder.

“This is so fucked up.”

The door jiggles. It’s muffled, but on the other side, a voice asks, “Do you think it’s closed?”

“Wouldn’t there be a sign?”

“The James Turrell downstairs is closed,” comes a reply. “Maybe things are just closed.”

“I’ll open you up,” Kyle hisses, and he wedges one of his fingers between Stan’s foreskin and the searing heat of his coddled dick, forever swaddled. “I want to get my dick in there.” Kyle sounds so drunk, which he isn’t; all he had at brunch was coffee.

But Stan feels that way, too. “Can you fit it?” he asks. All he wants is for Kyle to get his fingers out of there and drop to his knees.

“Remember how good it was that one time back in Paris?” Kyle asks. “Something about museums. Or just trips or whatever, _fuck._ ”

“I don’t think you got it in,” Stan says, though he also doesn’t care. He can’t stand the sight of Kyle forcibly shoving his dick in, so instead Stan stares at the outline of Kyle’s behind across the room, in the mirror. His ass looks great, Stan thinks; his hair could use some work from the back, though, honestly. Stan sees himself bring one weak arm up to brace himself around Kyle’s shoulders, and then another. He puts his head on Kyle’s chest and just enjoys it. This is the closest Kyle’s ever come to topping, really; he’s conducting this experience with delighted little groans that sweep past Stan’s ears as Stan watches the whole thing unravel, minus the part where he actually sees what’s happening. He can’t even bring himself to feel bad or disrespectful, even as the visitors on the other side of the door say, “Well, we can ask downstairs—what a shame,” and shuffle off. It’s art, what Kyle’s doing. They’re making art. Not like Lankton—this is a real performance. It can’t be sculpted, recreated, frozen in time. When Kyle comes, that’s it, that’s the only time Kyle is ever going to come here, in this cloistered, mirrored room. The thought is enough to bring Stan off, too.

Kyle gets slack, and Stan knows what he needs: for Stan to take control again, to reign it in. He starts to kiss Kyle deeply, to make out with him; the messy entanglement of their dicks is just a footnote to the moment.

But Kyle pushes away from Stan’s chest; his cock is still hanging out, and there’s terror in his eyes. “Shit,” he says. “Shit!”

“What? That was pretty hot.”

“No, it’s—gross, I have to get out of here. I’m—I’m leaving, come on.” Kyle shoves his dick into his pants and slips out in his stocking feet. In the boot covers, Stan slides out after. He hopes Kyle remembers to grab his shoes.

* * *

IV.

Every Uber or Lyft ride is so incredibly awkward—always too hot and full of stilted conversation, or no conversation at all. Stan asks the driver, to be nice, if he’s been in Pittsburgh for a while. “All my life,” their previous drivers had uniformly said, but this one tells them, “I actually moved here about a year ago, from Orlando.”

Stan tries to be sympathetic with his reaction: “So this cold must be impossible for you, huh?”

“Well, last winter was worse.”

Kyle rolls his eyes, pressing his head against the window. He’s fingering his phone within his coat pocket, and then he slips it out.

“What brought you here from Orlando?” Stan was asking.

“My company got bought out, and I got relocated. It’s not bad here, we just had our first child—”

“Congrats, yeah, that’s awesome.”

Kyle is staring intently at his phone.

“So I’m just doing this while I’m on paternity leave.”

“Well, it’s great that you get that.”

“It is, yeah, it’s awesome, and I’m not heartbroken to leave Florida. My wife, she’s from Orlando, but I ended up there playing college basketball—I’m actually from Denver.”

“We’re from Denver,” says Stan, “I can’t believe it.”

Kyle groans and slips his phone back into his pocket.

“Oh, no way,” says their driver, “what brings you guys here?”

Stan looks to Kyle, and their eyes lock. He shakes his head, and Stan said, slowly, “Just kind of—visiting, you know, long weekend.”

“You gotta be pumped about the Super Bowl!”

“Well, I am,” says Stan. “He’s indifferent.”

“The best defense Denver’s had in years,” says the diver. “ _In years_.”

“Thank god for John Elway, you know?”

“Well, he’s an asshole, but I guess the man knows football. He put together a great defense.”

“Wait,” says Stan. “What do you mean he’s an asshole?”

“Oh my god,” Kyle mutters. “Stan, you know he is.”

“He’s not an asshole.”

“He’s got this steakhouse—” says the Uber driver.

“He’s aware.” Kyle is rubbing his eyes.

“It’s amazing,” Stan says. “Do you like it?”

“You know, it’s pretty good,” says the driver. “Solid, you know. I mean, dependable? The food’s good, I guess. But it’s _so_ overpriced.” They’re now on a highway that skims the northern bank of the city, and from the car window they can see downtown. “I guess that’s kind of like a metaphor for Elway to me. Solid? Not remarkable. Kind of overpriced.”

“Are you saying John Elway is overpaid? We just won a Super Bowl—”

“He’s saying Elway’s a tool, Stan! Jesus, don’t you get it?”

“He’s not a tool,” says Stan, “I mean, right?”

“Hey, man, your boyfriend said it,” says the driver. “Not me.”

All three of them are silent for the rest of the car trip.

* * *

 

V.

“This is the cutest place,” says their Lyft driver. According to the app, her name is Sarah. “I love this place.”

“Oh?” Kyle's bent over his phone, noticing neither that they've arrived at the brunch place nor that they're supposed to get out of the car so their driver can pick up another fare. Another client. Whatever they call them. Kyle doesn't know, and Kyle doesn't care. "Yeah, I hope it's good," he mutters, frantically looking at something, or for something; from the other side of the backseat, it looks like he's hunting for treasure somewhere deep-down in his iPhone.

"Hey." Stan puts a tentative hand on Kyle's shoulder and gets his attention. "We're here, dude."

"What?" Kyle looks up at Stan and then at Sarah. She seems impatient for them to get out of her car. "Oh, okay." He unbuckles his seatbelt. They stumble out into the cold.

It's not until they’re seated that Stan points out, "You've been on your phone all morning."

"I know," says Kyle, "I'm texting Ike."

They order coffees. They order a plate of doughnuts. Kyle is still attached to his phone.

"Well," says Stan, "what's Ike saying?"

"Oh, I don't know, right now I'm rating the Lyft driver."

"You're rating her?"

"You know, I'm writing her a review—what's it to you?"

"It's nothing to me," says Stan, "it's nothing."

"It seems like it's something!"

"Just, we're at brunch, so can you please put your phone away?"

"I'm texting Ike!"

"Oh, for the love of—I'm going to the bathroom."

Stan gets up and leaves the table; Kyle's sitting against the wall, and he's relieved he doesn't have to do anything for Stan to walk away. It's cold in the corner, and the restaurant would be cozy if the heat were running properly: painted brick walls, decorated mantle, low ceilings, and a bunch of chatty locals. A waiter glides by and Kyle wonders if he intends to bother him. So Kyle shoots a look that he hopes says, “Not now.” Stan can deal with waiters. Sarah was a mediocre driver, and Kyle needs to get this down. She took a bad route. Kyle doesn’t know Pittsburgh, but he knows. He can tell when they’re taking the most direct way. It’s just that a lot of these drivers, if they sense or presume you’re not local, they’ll drag you all over town. On the night they got in, they got a car to go to dinner and found themselves not at their restaurant but some other suburb, with the driver being like, well, did you type in the right address but the wrong town? Kyle fundamentally doesn’t understand how urban planning anywhere can be so poor that the _same exact address_ would exist in two separate and distinct municipalities within the same metropolitan sprawl, not that Pittsburgh is very metropolitan. Not that Denver is very metropolitan, either, it clearly isn’t, though there’s a slick vibe around town that makes Kyle feel light and healthy and “with it,” like Denver is some kind of place to be. It’s not the best place, maybe, but it’s _some kind_ of place, whereas Pittsburgh is crumbling and worn, and being here makes Kyle feel very tired. Not bodily—emotionally. Kyle’s got no wherewithal for this. Stan had argued with him about it over dinner the night before:

“But Denver’s _way_ too polished,” Stan kept saying. “It’s very manufactured.”

“What do I care if someplace is manufactured if they made it nice?” Kyle asks.

“There’s some gritty realism here. I’m not saying I _love_ Pittsburgh.” It’s true that Stan had, earlier in the day, kicked a bike rack and screamed “goddammit!” after Google Maps informed him that it would take no fewer than three buses, with an eight-minute uphill walk, to get from the Cathedral of Learning to some bakery that Kyle had read, on Eater, made perfect paczki. They are now hundreds of dollars in the hole on hiring cars, especially with last night’s price surge in the face of light snow.

When Stan is back from the bathroom, and after he’s finished his cup of coffee, he grabs Kyle’s hand as it stills on his phone.

“Hey!”

“So,” Stan says, “what’s the deal with Ike?”

“Well, he’s very busy.” Frowning, Kyle drops the phone on the table, and Stan lets go of Kyle’s hand to push the phone to the side of the table.

“Busy doing what? Are we going to get dinner?”

“I don’t know,” says Kyle. “He won’t commit. He just keeps saying he’ll text us later. Then I said we’re going to check out some museums, and he said, what museums, and I said, I guess, the bird museum or the mattress museum, and I asked him if he wants to come, and now I’m waiting for him to get back to me.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” says Stan, “but you’re awful at planning.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes. You are. Just tell him we’re going to blank restaurant, at some time, and you made a reservation for three, and he should be there.”

“Well, what restaurant? At what time?”

“Wherever you want to go? I don’t care.”

“Oh, Stan, that’s such bullshit,” says Kyle. “Bullshit, Stan, of _course_ you care.”

“Okay, but if we’re here to see Ike, isn’t that the point? Like, isn’t _what_ we eat irrelevant? Pick someplace near him and just—come on.”

“I’m not making a reservation until he commits. I can’t just show up to a reservation for three with only two people. That’s so embarrassing.”

“I just can’t believe he let you make plans to come see him and now he like, won’t even get it together? I thought Ike was more responsible than this.”

Throughout the conversation, Kyle’s been staring at the plate of doughnuts in front of him. They’re beignet-like, more like fried dough globs that properly formed, carefully fried doughnuts. Finally, Kyle pinches one between his fingers.

“Well, he should be making time for us! I mean, he should make time for me. I came all the way here to see him.” Kyle pauses. “But, I didn’t exactly … check with him before I booked things. I just figured we’d figure it out, he’d make some time for me or whatever. I mean, he should! I am his _brother_. It’s not like he came home for Christmas. I haven’t seen him since this summer!” Kyle makes an apologetic, wide-eyed face before shoving the doughnut into his mouth.

Stan sucks in a breath. It’s startling. “Well,” he says, “that explains some things.”

* * *

VI.

All throughout dinner Stan’s parents have been asking the most uncomfortable questions. It’s taken them a lot of time for them to get to this point—that is, their asking Kyle any questions, instead of staring at him grimly across the dining room table. Until Kyle started dating Stan, Randy and Sharon were usually pleased to see him show up to dinner. They then went through a period of protracted shock during which they could barely acknowledge Kyle’s presence in their home. Now they have begun to force themselves to interact with Kyle again. At least they don’t ignore him anymore.

“So, did your, uh—” Randy Marsh never has his questions prepared. Perhaps he feels like he needn’t bother with this interloper ruining his family’s Christmas, or maybe he’s comparably lazy and disengaged with everything else in his life, too. Kyle doesn’t know, and his only real feelings toward Randy are dependent upon how Randy affects Stan, which is, most of the time, negatively. Every time Randy calls, Stan has what Kyle estimates to be three-quarters of a nervous breakdown: ‘why can’t he just leave me alone forever,’ that kind of thing. Stan only goes to Christmas dinner to see his mother and sister, he says.

But Randy’s trying. “Did your, um, brother?” He waits for Kyle to slowly nod. “Did he come home for Christmas? Your dad was telling me that, um, maybe—”

“No,” Kyle interrupts, perhaps too brusquely, “he did not come home for Christmas. We don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“I bet your parents are disappointed,” says Sharon.

“I don’t know,” Kyle lies. “They’ve actually decided last-minute to go see my aunt in Miami Beach, so.”

“So what?” asks Randy.

Kyle just shrugs.

“Remind us where he goes?” asks Sharon.

“Carnegie Mellon,” says Kyle. “It’s in Pittsburgh.” He looks around the table. It takes a second, but then Kyle is able to mark this moment—the first time everyone around the table at Christmas dinner at Stan’s house is actually listening to what he has to say. Except, of course, for Stan, who knows this, and who is tearing apart his piece of baked salmon for microscopic bones with near-compulsion and disgusting intensity.

“He’s a senior,” Kyle babbles; he’s had a few glasses of white wine with his fish. “He’s a comp sci major, like I was, only he’s a lot better at it.” Kyle hears himself laugh awkwardly, and it doesn’t stop him.

“Have you ever gone to see him in Pittsburgh?” Stan’s mother asks. They all drink a lot here, and she’s the most clear-eyed one. She’s always been the most charitable to Kyle, even when he was a kid, inviting him over and asking him to stay for dinner and, on the occasion of his bar mitzvah, writing him a little note about how she was so impressed seeing him grow up into a fine young man, and Stan was so lucky to have him as a “super best friend,” and blah blah blah something else, Kyle can’t remember it right now, but it was sweet of her, and it hurt when, after Stan announced that they were dating a few years ago, she grew a little distant for a while.

“I’ve never gone to Pittsburgh, no,” Kyle says, and as it comes out of his mouth he knows it sounds strange. “Well, he’s so busy, they work so hard there.” He’s telling this to himself and not so much to anyone else. Stan notices Kyle’s wine glass is empty at this point and reaches over to refill it, but Kyle slaps his hand over the mouth of his glass and leans forward to tell Sharon, “It’s just been really hard for me to find the time to connect with him, you know, I’m so busy with all of my applications, and he’s so busy with all of his stuff that it’s just never really worked out. Plus, I don’t even know what I’d do if I went to Pittsburgh. What do they even have there?”

“It’s where ketchup is from,” says Randy.

“Ketchup comes from Britain by way of the Subcontinent,” Stan says, finally deciding to contribute something. “You know, it’s chutney.”

“No, I’m pretty sure Heinz is from Pittsburgh. That and steel, it’s the Steel City.”

“Okay.” Stan rolls his eyes. He’s still stupidly holding the bottle of wine from which he tried to offer Kyle a refill. “Well, they have a couple of good museums. Better ones than here, to be honest.”

“Is that so?” Stan’s sister asks him, with an unrestrained glee like she’s overjoyed to finally get in on this.

“Oh, yeah, Denver’s not exactly known for its art scene. Amazing artists don’t exactly come out of Colorado.”

“Well, that must suck for you,” says Shelly.

“It won’t be an issue when Kyle gets into grad school, and I go wherever he’s going.”

“Well, where is he applying to grad school?” Shelly asks.

“Well—” Kyle is beginning to answer when Stan’s mother interrupts him and says, “Excuse me?”

“I said I’m moving with Kyle in the fall.”

“When were you going to tell us this?”

“I just did?”

“Randy, are you hearing this? You can’t just leave the state, Stanley, what about your job?”

“There are jobs in other states,” Stan says, “and it’s stupid to worry about it when Kyle’s not even done applying to places.”

“Randy, are you listening to this?”

“Don’t upset your mother, Stanley.”

“How? By not living my life? How is that productive, is that really what you want for me? To stay in this crazy little rat trap town?” Shelly snorts at this. “Come on, don’t fight with me about this at Christmas dinner, for fuck’s sake, I’m staying the night and everything.”

“What’s so bad about this town?” Stan’s father asks. “I mean, okay, it’s got like—some weirdos in it, but we can kick them out. We can get everything here that you can get in Denver. Plus some weirdos. But, we can kick them out!”

“Stop saying we can kick out the weirdos, Randy,” says Sharon. “Most people in this town think you’re a weirdo.”

“Me? I’m not a weirdo! How am I a weirdo? Is your father a weirdo, Shelly?”

“I’m not responding to that.”

“If you think I’m a weirdo, Sharon, then I guess this weirdo’s provided you a pretty nice weirdo life in this weirdo town, huh?”

“You’re the one who said it was a weirdo town,” says Sharon.

“Nuh-uh, I didn’t say it was a weirdo town, I just said it was full of weirdos. And we can kick them out!”

Kyle clears his throat. “Because that always solves everything, right? Kicking a bunch of people out of their home?”

“I know, right? Thank you, Kyle.”

Kyle stares at Stan’s father with a look that he’s relieved he doesn’t have to see on his own face.

~

Later, when it’s past midnight and finally Christmas, Kyle sits on Stan’s desk and looks out the window onto his own childhood home. It’s empty now, because Ike decided not to come home for Christmas break, and then his parents decided that if Ike wasn’t coming home, it wasn’t important for them to stay. Then they got last-minute plane tickets to Florida. It wasn’t until earlier in the afternoon that Kyle realized he no longer had a key to his own home. Standing in front of the door, he tried all of the dozen-plus keys on his key-fob, some of them over and over again, while delicate snow fell onto the stoop, melting without accumulation. Kyle’s parents’ house is the only one with snow on the walkway to the front door and in the driveway—they left town and didn’t hire anyone to clear it. Sitting on Stan’s desk now and pondering that moment in particular, he’s not even sure why he wanted to get into that house—it’s not like anyone was inside it to greet him. His room is now packed with his father’s legal records.

Across the way Kyle had hoped he’d spare a glance into Ike’s room, but the curtains are shut. He hates his parents for that, much as he hates himself for throwing away the key to his childhood home, probably in some fit of manic cleaning terror as he was also bitching to Stan about how they have way too much shit, can’t Stan be less of a hoarder, why do they own all of this crap, look at all these fucking keys on my keychain, do I even use all of these?

Well, now he regrets it, but he won’t admit that to Stan, who comes into the room and says, “Oh my god, you scared me.”

Kyle turns and sees him standing in the doorway in his tight jeans and ironic Christmas sweater—they ran into Craig Tucker at the grocery store this morning; he was carrying a turkey and took one look at Stan and his features tightened up into a mask of pure disgust, and he said, “Nice sweater,” in such a chilling way that Stan declared, when they were back in the car, “I am never removing this sweater.”

Though he does now, just tossing it on the floor.

“Come on,” says Kyle, “fold that up and put it back in your suitcase.”

Shockingly, he does, picking it up off the floor as he asks, “What are you doing sitting on my desk?”

“I don’t know,” says Kyle. “I guess just staring?”

“At what?”

“At my house.”

Stan pushes Kyle aside and kneels next to him on the bare desk. It’s solidly built, some sad old heirloom, the kind of thing Stan would love to sand and re-stain. He wraps a naked arm around Kyle’s shoulders and says, “Sorry about the key.”

“Yeah, don’t be, I’m better off without it.”

“And, sorry about my family, I guess,” says Stan. “I think I should have stopped after three glasses. I shouldn’t have told them.”

“About moving? Why not, it’s our plan. It’s _the_ plan—they’d have found out eventually.”

“Or I could have just disappeared without saying anything, as if—poof! Just disappear.”

“Poof, just disappear,” Kyle repeats.

“They would have asked eventually, though.”

“Or maybe not,” Kyle figures, and he puts his head against Stan’s chest.

All night and into Christmas morning, and over the cinnamon rolls Shelly got up to bake at 5 a.m., and when he’s opening a boxed set of Harry Potter DVDs (which looks re-gifted), and even on the drive home, Kyle thinks about how much he’s let down his brother.

“I should have gone to see him the first year he was in college,” Kyle says. “I mean, I should have gone every year.”

They’re back home in their Capitol Hill one-bedroom, preparing to go into work the next day.

Stan is unfurling his balled-up sweater and shaking it out. “Maybe he doesn’t mind.”

“He may or may not, but I’m the older brother, you know? It’s my job to go either way.”

“A relationship with someone isn’t a job,” Stan says, furrowing his brow. “You’re not exactly obligated to do this or that. You were busy, he was busy, it happens.”

“He should have come home.”

“Maybe South Park’s not his home anymore,” Stan says. “Maybe Pittsburgh is.”

It’s a disturbing thought because there’s real weight to it—it’s not just empty talk. It takes Kyle all day to come to the conclusion that he ought to go see Ike, and soon—it’s his last semester of college coming up. Then Kyle will move somewhere, with any luck, presuming he gets into graduate school, and then Ike will move on to something else himself, though Kyle doesn’t know what that might be, or if Ike has even made an attempt to figure it out. Their parents have been unhelpful in this regard, telling Kyle when he tries to bring it up with them that Ike is smart and resourceful and they’re not worried. “I’m worried,” Kyle will say. “I’m really worried,” but no one ever listens to him, and that’s why they all get into messes. It’s not as if their parents were especially patient with Kyle, either, when he was finishing college. It’s like they burned out on parenting, realized Ike wasn’t going to die in a gang war or a drug overdose, took comfort in that, and said, “Fuck it.”

“What if we went to Pittsburgh over President’s Day weekend?” Kyle asks Stan over dinner, which is a late-night meal of Chinese take-out for them, as it is every year on Christmas. “Airfares are so low,” Kyle says as he clicks around kayak.com, “and a new Ace Hotel is opening up—the one in Palm Springs was amazing. We should go.”

“I don’t know.” Stan is using a pair of chopsticks to break open an egg roll, which is one of the non-Szechuan dishes they traditionally split. He does it from the inside-out, pulling the egg roll apart instead of trying to push it in on its own center.

“It’ll be Valentine’s that weekend,” Kyle says, “and when’s the last time we did something nice for Valentine’s?”

“Two years ago with Kenny when we went to Rawhides and he paid for you to get a lap dance.”

“But that wasn’t romantic,” says Kyle.

“Is Pittsburgh romantic?” Stan asks.

“It’s just the perfect plan,” Kyle insists. “The perfect, perfect plan.”

“I don’t know, I mean—is Ike cool with you coming to visit?”

“Yeah, Ike is totally cool with me coming to visit!”

“Have you _asked_ him?”

“No, I’ll just tell him we’re coming. This is going to be so awesome! Okay, I’m going to get my credit card.” Kyle hops off the couch and runs to fetch it, shouting, “This is going to be perfect!”

“I’m sure,” Stan mumbles, but Kyle doesn’t hear him.


End file.
